


Renewal

by lesbomancy



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 18:19:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7856065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbomancy/pseuds/lesbomancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viear Askulla faces the declining health of his mother with a renewed perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Renewal

Mosquitoes buzzed around Viear’s face and neck as he approached the small Indoril-styled architecture outside the kwama mine where he grew up. The letter from his father was as vague and businesslike as the person himself, the mer a little proud that he could finally read such things himself rather than give them up to a friend or stranger and have the embarrassing man exposed freely like a dick flopping in the breeze. He caught sight of his mother as she left the kwama mine, the once perky and supportive woman looking like she was a hollowed-out pumpkin with sharper features from the lost weight. Each movement was a labored breath, pain etched with each rotation, her slender fingers shaking as she tried in vain to rub the pain out of her wrists. Her hand reached down to a nearby rock and she lowered herself with a whimper, breathing heavily from the effort.

Something was wrong.

Not like she’d let him know just yet. She straightened up almost immediately and life rushed into every single one of her features as if she were a bag being blown up with air. She ran to her son, wrapping him in a weak embrace before peppering him with kisses on the cheek. She praised the Three for him and his health, praised the Three for him coming when they asked. It had been too long, and when she calmed down enough to realize she was panting they made their way inside of the old house. Viear’s father was chipping away at chunks of kwama cuttle, forcing them into manageable slivers in a set of buckets. The mustachioed, heavyset man smelled more like kwama than anything else and he smacked into Viear so hard that the mer almost fell off of his feet. Rough, calloused hands gripping and patting his shoulder, only almost slipping up once with his name.

He was trying. He was always trying.

Viear’s father served the only luxury their threadbare lives could ever afford: Canis Root tea. The aroma bellowed out from a large teapot as they sat in the three-room building, enjoying each other’s company and interrogating Viear. Making sure that he was saying all of his prayers (he wasn’t) and that he was trying his hardest to stay happy (he wasn’t) and sober (he was) despite his rough life. It smelled like every holiday he had as a child in the room before long. Every ‘feast’ which dwarfed in comparison to what he could afford after a single guard duty job with the Fangs or aboard his old ship.

When his mother started wheezing and clutching her chest, he didn’t know what to do. His hand gripped the tea cup in his hands so tight that the clay vessel threatened to snap like a twig. Viear’s father soothed the woman, dumping an aromatic mixture of herbs into her tea, holding the cup for her so she could drink it. He tried explaining to Viear what was going on with an ill-conceived metaphor which made absolutely no sense and instead left the man’s one full brow raised in confusion.

Sometimes a kwama accidentally drinks a worker’s sujamma, he said out loud. The rest of it was a broken cacophony of noise. He caught bits and pieces more than the full picture the longer it went on.

_Your mother is ill. We’ve been to Deshaan and we’ve seen several healers, even had an artisan healer from the Shad Astula come over. It’s started to get worse. She’ll be around for years if she stays active and takes her medicine._

Viear’s mother grabbed his hand, unable to stop the faint shaking. It felt like a stranger’s hand, but he held it anyway. He looked at her and saw only what he wanted to see; the pious woman who accepted him and always believed in him. His mother.

Noise. Words held together by a string that felt like a punch to the gut.

 

_We’ve tried everything._

_I’ve made my peace, Viear. I’m not upset anymore._

_Even with a chipped beak a kwama will survive most of it's life._

_If you could visit more, I would be able to fade happily._

_The cuttle is always strongest in a bunch._

_Almalexia has blessed me with a good life._

_All the arrangements have been made, son._

_I will always love you._

_It's going to be okay._

 

Information like that made you numb. It made time a void that didn’t really exist, you’d just blink and appear at another point as you were lost in your thoughts. Wanting to stop it, hating that you couldn’t, bargaining that maybe you could if you just did this one thing, blaming yourself and rationalizing that if you were a better son, maybe your mother wouldn’t be fucking dying like a million other people in a million other parts of Tamriel. Just another kwama farmer; nobody would give a shit except Viear, his father and a few other scattered family members. His perception shrunk to that of a passenger, almost certain that it wasn’t him as he moved around and helped them with chores. Chipping some excess cuttle, setting and eating dinner and doing the dishes afterwards. It was just like old times, only he was too shocked to do anything about it. Felt too sick.

When the sun fell and the moon rose they shared a loving embrace, Viear’s body shaking with barely contained sorrow, grief and rage as he shook the body of his mother; the one that was almost thirty pounds lighter and felt nothing like the woman who would smear homemade medicines on his knees and heels after a long day of spelunking in the cavern that they worked in. She smelled different, too, as if the life was slowly wisping out from her mouth and nose like a vapor.

It wasn’t made any better when he hugged his father. The wide-shouldered man that felt the same as he ever did; tense and wanting to be closer than his own insecurities would ever let him be to the only son that he always loved and always would love.

The dense, overwhelming air of warmth around his face and the thudding of his chest almost had him collapse but he instead made it to his old room. The airy mer house was good at keeping it from getting too warm by Morrowind standards but it also meant that there was always so much fucking noise. It was hard to focus, harder to stave off a panic attack. Death wasn’t new, but it wasn’t something that touched someone this close. This was different; these were the ironclad dumbass parents he sometimes hated for being boring and dense and obsessed with kwama farming.

And one of them was dying.

He had nothing to numb himself with, so he spent the night crying. Sweating in the awful humidity of Morrowind while thumping his closed fists against his temples. Cursing the Three, cursing all the other gods and cursing his mother for not being able to get better. Helplessness was a quick path to self-destruction but without that outlet it rolled around in his stomach like a rubber ball, jerking his emotions from one end to the other at the whim of a single thought.

One of his legs jerked out from underneath him, kicking a stool across the child’s room which once was big enough to be a castle for him. Now it was a depressing rectangle with a bed that his ankles hung over. With a fury he stomped his way to the washroom and looked into the mounted mirror that hung over the basin, his chest heaving as he choked back tears. Shaky hands grabbed a pair of shears and he pulled his ponytail as tight as possible. Twenty minutes of sobbing and cursing and cutting as he removed all of it. He didn’t stop until he killed the person that stood there at the beginning. The sharp metal tools clanged to the ground with a dismissive huff and he ran his hands across his scalp, bits and pieces of hair snowing off of him before he dunked his head in the water-filled basin.

Fingers ran across the wet, short hair. The shears did their job. He looked in the mirror at himself; the burns he still wasn’t used to seeing or feeling and the glass eye that would always itch just a little. He wasn’t complete, not emotionally or physically, he didn’t know what to do to make himself whole again or if his quest to destroy the canonreeve that hunted him and his crew down would actually result in any sort of closure for the deaths of those he loved. Not that he would admit to anything resembling love, especially not to those he did.

He gripped the basin tightly. It was time to be reborn as his own man, however fragmented that would be. Not the scared kid from Morrowind, not the crippled sailor or the abused drug addict. He’d be someone fresh, not entirely whole but determined to fill the gaps and grow. He was going to be the guy to kill a fucking canonreeve and make sure his mother had as much fucking Canis Root tea as she wanted.

Viear was whoever the fuck he **wanted** to be.


End file.
